Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to displaying presentations on a display device, and, more particularly to a method and computer readable medium for controlling pagination of dynamic-length presentations for display on different sized display devices.
Description of the Related Art
With the rapid growth of the Internet, people are moving to viewing documents and presentations online. A typical dynamic-length presentation is a rich, attractive multi-page document such as a magazine or a textbook which is designed on one device, but is read by others on a variety of display devices such as tablet computers, mobile phones, PDAs, laptop computers and the like. It has a dynamic-length because a magazine article may contain a first number of pages when it is displayed on a tablet computer, but may, for example, contain a second different number of pages when it is displayed on a smaller mobile phone or alternatively, may contain a third further different number of pages when it is displayed on a larger laptop computer. Presentations contain a primary text flow which is the text content of the presentation, and also contain a substantive amount of graphic and/or stylized elements which are typically designed on a page-by-page basis. That is, each page has an individual design that is authored with an intended user experience on a specific user device or class of user device. However, due to the unknown size of the display device on which the presentation will be viewed, authors have little control over how a presentation will be presented on another device. From the perspective of an author, such unpredictability or lack of control is highly undesirable for designed presentations due to the potential loss of intended user experience.
One conventional approach to page design uses design templates written in a template language, in a manner similar to web page designs. However, this approach burdens a presentation author to have considerable knowledge of template language. Another conventional approach uses a presentation having fixed size pages, such as PDF (portable document format), which requires an end user viewing the presentation to zoom and pan through a document. In this case the elements of a page that are intended to be viewed in a single view may not be visible, and the user may need to pan the page to view each element individually. Therefore, such an approach may cause inconvenience to the user, and a potentially undesirable loss in the user experience. Another known approach includes designing multiple versions of a presentation to match the anticipated screen sizes of various display devices. However, such an approach significantly increases the burden on the author to anticipate and design for various screen sizes, making the process very tedious.
Thus, conventional approaches are either difficult and/or inefficient to implement. Such approaches do not recognize specific display device characteristics, but rather force-fit a designed page onto a display device, and therefore may be inherently deficient in effectively rendering the presentation.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and computer readable medium to control pagination of dynamic-length presentations.